DGC Group · Enterprise capability
A discipline for building organisational capabilities that last.
Strategies, programmes, systems and organisational structures are means. The capability an organisation needs to create or strengthen is the outcome of bringing those means together coherently.
Enterprise Capability Engineering treats that capability as the primary object of design.
Why capability matters
An organisation can successfully complete programmes, implement systems, restructure teams and introduce new processes without becoming materially more capable.
Outputs matter, but they are not the same as sustained ability.
Enterprise Capability Engineering focuses on the organisation's ability to achieve an intended outcome repeatedly and under the conditions it actually faces.
What is an enterprise capability?
An enterprise capability is the integrated, repeatable ability of an enterprise to achieve an intended outcome under defined operating conditions.
The important word is integrated.
An organisation may possess strong people, sound processes, capable technology, clear governance and useful information and still fail to produce the intended outcome if those elements do not work together as one capability.
It is the integration of purpose, ownership, participants, resources, information, mechanisms, measures and operating conditions around an intended outcome.
The method
Discover what actually exists, why it behaves as it does and what conditions shape it.
Turn understanding into intent, choices and a definition of what success must mean.
Connect the organisational, operational and technical elements required to create the capability.
Build and change in a way that proves the capability incrementally rather than merely completing outputs.
Transfer ownership, establish operation, measure performance and create the means for the capability to continue evolving.
Advisory runs continuously through all five movements.
The movements are not a waterfall. An engagement can enter where reality requires, iterate backwards and forwards, and continue learning through operation.
Enterprise design
Capability design begins above technology.
Purpose and outcomes establish why the capability exists. Strategy and principles establish the choices that guide it. The capability model defines what is being designed.
From there, the design moves through operating model, governance, organisation, services, operating conditions, information and architecture, platforms and technology, and measures and assurance.
A continuous thread of traceability connects those decisions so that implementation can always be related back to the outcome the enterprise intends to achieve.
Outcomes
A capability exists to create a changed condition, not merely to produce artefacts.
The outcome model connects the intended change, the stakeholders who experience it, the evidence that shows whether it happened and the outputs believed to contribute to it.
Outputs can change as understanding improves. The intended outcome remains the anchor.
Enterprise Capability Engineering
The two volumes develop Enterprise Capability Engineering from its foundations and method through to detailed enterprise design and practice.
Book One · Forthcoming
Why organisations struggle, and how to build capabilities that last
Book One examines why organisations can deliver successfully without becoming more capable, establishes the foundations of enterprise capability, and introduces the Enterprise Capability Engineering method.
Book Two · Forthcoming
What a capability is made of, and how to work on one
Book Two takes the discipline into enterprise design and practice, working through the decisions required to design, build, transform and sustain capability.
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